Academic mothers, professional identity and COVID-19: Feminist reflections on career cycles, progression and practice.

Abstract

Based on a collection of auto‐ethnographic narratives that reflect our experiences as academic mothers at an Australian university, this paper seeks to illustrate the impact of COVID‐19 on our career cycles in order to explore alternative feminist models of progression and practice in Higher Education. Collectively, we span multiple disciplines, parenting profiles, and racial/ethnic backgrounds. Our narratives (initiated in 2019) explicate four focal points in our careers as a foundation for analyzing self‐definitions of professional identity: pre‐ and post‐maternity career break; and pre‐ and post‐COVID‐19 career. We have modeled this research on a collective feminist research practice that is generative and empowering in terms of self‐reflective models of collaborative research. Considering this practice and these narratives, we argue for a de‐centering of masculinized career cycle patterns and progression pathways both now and beyond COVID‐19. This represents both a challenge to neo‐liberal norms of academic productivity, as well as a call to radically enhance institutional gender equality policies and practice.